Requirements for Predictive Analytics

It is important to have a clear understanding of how traditional Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics are different and how they fit together in optimizing organizational decision making. With tradition BI, activities are focused primarily on providing context to enhance a known set of information through aggregation, data cleansing and delivery mechanisms. As these organizations mature their BI ecosystems, they achieve a clearer picture of the key performance indicators signaling the relative health of their operations. Organizations that embark on activities surrounding predictive analytics and data mining go beyond simply presenting the data in a manner that will allow decisions makers to have a complete context around the information. These organizations generate models based on known information and then apply other organizational data against these models to reveal unknown information.